Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday June 30, 2011 @02:55AM
from the that-should-do-it dept.

daedae writes "The Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents studios including Twentieth Century Fox and Walt Disney, have filed suit in the UK against BT, Britain's largest ISP. The studios are asking for an injunction which would force BT to block access to Newzbin, on the grounds of massive losses to Usenet piracy."

Awh, poor BT, after taking it up the ass for the content owners, they get it shoved up there again!

Remember that when dealing with the content industry, if you give them a finger, they bite of your head.

Once this motion passed, other motions will be easier and easier until the entire internet consist only of sites the content industry approves off. And politicians who are used to compromises let it all happen because they think the content industry will meet them half way. The problem with meeting someone half way is that if it is you who keeps doing this, sooner or later you are completely on the other side.

Interesting trivia: The Ewoks speak nonsense Tagalog. One of my coworkers was telling me about the first time she watched that movie while still living in the Philippines, and she actually knew what they said, though it was meaningless.

The main reason for that is actually on topic: the movie industry. Dutch TV contains a huge amount of foreign-language content, with subtitles. If you grow up listening to foreign languages and reading subtitles of the translations, it's hard to avoid learning at least a bit of a few other languages, and English has the advantage that everyone speaks it badly, especially native speakers...

Just as bad is the fact that they want to use Cleanfeed, the system that silently and transparently blocks child porn sites. Talk about a slippery slope. We were assured that this system would not be abused for commercial reasons, it was purely for blocking the worst examples of child abuse.

BT has a history of screwing its customers. They throttle iPlayer and YouTube so you can't watch the high quality streams in the evenings, and heavily retard (or "manage" as they prefer) P2P traffic. They have data unlimits* too. They also conducted secret Phorm trials and somehow got away without anyone going to jail. Oh, and according to Ofcom their "up to 20Mb" service gets an average of about 7Mb.

* In ISP land "unlimited" now means the same thing as "limited", the only possible difference being that with unlimited sometimes the actual figure is a secret (e.g. Virgin's is 350GB/month but they don't publish it). I suppose it is a bit like flammable and inflammable. Therefore I am coining a new word: unlimit. It means the same thing as limit.

CLeanfeed was already being abused... ORON was being blocked allegedly because some of the images being hosted there were kiddie porn, but the entire site was being blocked... it just so happens ORON is also a weblocker type company and was hosting content other than kiddie porn... the end result of blocking it for the few items of kiddie porn was that it was also being blocked for the pirated content it was hosting... I was wondering when Rapidshare and the other weblocker firms would fall foul of Cleanfee

There are two limits on Virgin, the daytime and evening STM limits where they throttle your connection down to below 20% normal speed, and the hidden 350GB monthly limit. If you pass the monthly limit they send you a nasty letter informing you that you are using their unlimited service too much and please try to stay within the unlimit in future.

And politicians who are used to compromises let it all happen because they think the content industry will meet them half way.

The original sin was to invent copyright in the first place. If you grand some rights to anybody or any entity, you can't expect that entity to compromise on it: they'll want it enforced, no matter what, because the moment you granted them that right, you've always sold the farm. All WE can do, is to heat up the pressure on the politicians to limit copyright again. But I highly dou

The original sin was to invent copyright in the first place. If you grand some rights to anybody or any entity, you can't expect that entity to compromise on it:

There's nothing absolute about copyright any more than any other human right. It's all a question of what society agrees amongst itself is a good idea. So there is absolutely no reason not to hav reasonable copyright laws.

The concept of copyright in itself is not such a bad thing. Firstly it is the cornerstone on top of which the GPL and a large amount of open source software is built:

The GPL wouldn't need to exist if we didn't have copyrights.

That said, I will agree with your first point - The granting of extremely limited exclusive rights for a single-digit number of years after creation quite likely does encourage people to create; Allowing the enforcement of copyrights for so long that the original vanishes into ob

The intent of the GPL is to encourage people to work collaboratively such that modifications are available to everyone. Without copyright law, the GPL becomes an MIT or BSD style license whereby anyone can take anything and use it for anything they want without ever contributing back changes. That's a huge difference. Its the cornerstone distinction between the GPL and other, more liberal licenses.

And contrary to the hippy ignorance which always seems to surround the anit-copyright

Without copyright law, the GPL becomes an MIT or BSD style license whereby anyone can take anything and use it for anything they want without ever contributing back changes.

You've inappropriately mixed contexts here, though... Without copyright, we have no need for someone to contribute back to the community, because the community doesn't need "permission" to take what they have and run with it.

In the closest situation that does exhibit the problem behavior you describe - A modification to GPL'd code f

You've inappropriately mixed contexts here, though... Without copyright, we have no need for someone to contribute back to the community, because the community doesn't need "permission" to take what they have and run with it.

Let's assume we have that hypothetical no-copyright world.

Suppose I take some GPL'd library, build a product around it, and sell it as binaries only, no source code. Now, the community doesn't need permission to take what they have, yes. But all they have is a huge binary, which is pretty much useless for them. The effective contribution is thus zero.

Whereas, in a world with GPL+copyright, the community gets back the code which is then reused by members of that community...

Coincidentally, this is also Stallman's official stance on copyright [computerworlduk.com] - he would agree to ditch copyright altogether, but only if the law would enforce copyleft (i.e. source availability) universally instead.

I knew there was a better link regarding copyright and RMS than the one I was posting, thanks for reminding me of it

Pull your head from your ass and stop offering red herrings as a troll.

By pushing a socialist agenda (all your work is our work and you have no say, and we'll consume said work without compensation), as it directly affects the market, it is by definition, anti-capitalism and pro-socialism. You can't force people to give away their work for free and claim you are anything other than socialist - at best.

The government granting a monopoly is the very essence of modern copyright. This is certainly not a red hearing, and certainly not trolling. It's a simple statement of the principles and nature of a thing. I am not trolling, just because I've exposes a contradiction in you thinking. Nay, you have bought into an equivocation (I'll get to that later)

If I copy a thing, the person still has the thing for which they worked. If you make a bike and I copy the design, you can still pedal up and down the street all

There is no contradiction - except in your retarded brain. The fact you believe there is a contradiction only proves you have absolutely no fucking clue what you are talking about - which is, in fact, 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of every pro-pirate dipshit who stupidity posts on the topic.

It boils down real quick and simple so either you'll completely understand and agree or it will completely validate you're a stupid, lying, dumb, piece of shit. Either everyone needs to participate in a socialist econ

2. I've provided example of at least two methods that can be used to make money from original artistic content that depend on a market, but do no depend on a copyright. I've provided links to works written by people who research the topic as part of their profession to support my argument. Yet if I don't agree with you (who by all appearances has no special knowledge of the subject, and is not acquainted with writings of those who do) I'm stupid or dishonest

The argument isn't that "but its socialism", its that you are demanding a free ride in a capitalistic society. When your work is given for the greater good, get back to me. Until such time, you're just a lying, hypocritical, thieving, piece of shit.

Anything more that 5-7 years, and anything that prevents non-commercial verbatim copying is intolerable. (95% of creators extract 95% or more of potential rents within that time frame anyways) Only huge and already successful creators benifit from more time that that.

Firstly it is the cornerstone on top of which the GPL and a large amount of open source software is built:

As pointed out; without copyright there would be little need to have the GPL.

Secondly, there are many of us who rely on producing content protected by copyright in order to put food in our mouths and pay the rent.

Not that many. Most writers I know don't make any money from copyright. They make money writing bits and pieces on demand, giving talks, etc. Only really popular writers actually make money from being able to stop someone else selling their material.
Similarly, most musicians I know make money from recording jingles, doing backing tracks, playing live, giving lessons, etc. Only really big and popular bands make

Secondly, there are many of us who rely on producing content protected by copyright in order to put food in our mouths and pay the rent. Take the example of computer games, these take many man hours to produce initially from many different people but can be infinitely copied once they are a finished product. Without the concept of copyright you could buy a computer game, then sell it on as many times as you wanted without sharing any of the vast profits you made with the people who produced the product originally. Since you did not have the overheads of actually producing the game in the first place you could sell it far cheaper than the original authors and so more people would buy it from you than them. This would obviously not be any fairer than the current system.

Firstly, copyright originated as a system of censorship. If your book didn't have a copyright mark, you weren't allowed to publish it. Such marks were only granted to government friendly or neutral works.

Which just means the first few copies could be priced very highly or the game is not released unless a certain number of people pre-order it. It's not like there is just one possible way of doing things. You've made a false dichotomy, the way creative content is sold and supported now in the mainstream

Secondly, there are many of us who rely on producing content protected by copyright in order to put food in our mouths and pay the rent. Take the example of computer games, these take many man hours to produce initially from many different people but can be infinitely copied once they are a finished product. Without the concept of copyright you could buy a computer game, then sell it on as many times as you wanted without sharing any of the vast profits you made with the people who produced the product originally. Since you did not have the overheads of actually producing the game in the first place you could sell it far cheaper than the original authors and so more people would buy it from you than them. This would obviously not be any fairer than the current system.

Firstly, copyright originated as a system of censorship. If your book didn't have a copyright mark, you weren't allowed to publish it. Such marks were only granted to government friendly or neutral works.

Which just means the first few copies could be priced very highly or the game is not released unless a certain number of people pre-order it. It's not like there is just one possible way of doing things. You've made a false dichotomy, the way creative content is sold and supported now in the mainstream or no way. There are other methods that do not require an intellectual monopoly. By having free adaptation and modification, one can argue that a lack of copyright will lead to more creative content being available. The works of Shakespeare and the greatest classical composers were created without the protection of copyright. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote without copyright.

Check out Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine or Against Intellectual Property by Stephan N Kinsella for some very cogent free-market arguments against copyright.

Firstly, I do not care how the system of copyright originated, I care what it evolved into. We started off as sea dwelling microbes but that bares little relation to us now.

Secondly Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote before the printing press so there was far less need for copyright in his time with regard to books. The big thing that has changed recently is the ease with which things can be infinitely copied. You also completely ignored me mentioning computer games, this analogy was chosen specificall

I did not ignore computer games, I gave you two models in which you could make money from them without copyright that I will now repeat. Charge a very high price for the first few copies, so that those who wanted to copy and sell at a low price would have to bid against each other to be the first in the market. Or don't release until you've presold enough to cover costs. Another method I've not yet mentioned, but in use today is to release only on consoles or other devices protected by signing keys from cop

to have given an accurate summary? They are not asking for an injunction again Newzbin, that site was sued into oblivion. They are asking for an injunction against Newzbin2 which has arisen to take its place. TFA you submitted says just that.

Actually I can't hold you to that, the article is horridly written.

"The Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents studios including Twentieth Century Fox and Walt Disney, is urging a judge to grant an order forcing telecoms group BT to cut off access to the Newzbin website."

"The MPA won a court battle against Newzbin last year and the site was taken offline."

"But it reopened abroad under the name "Newzbin2" and is run by anonymous operators, compelling the MPA to take the unusual step of trying to force BT to block the site."

This is why you hire editor's to proof these things children. Someone should have slapped this writer for contradicting himself within his own story.

Kill Newsbin2 and Newsbin3 will take it's place, kill Niewsbin3 and along comes Newsbin4. Will the MPAA never accept that there is no winning this battle and concentrate it's energies on producing products that people are actually willing to buy instead of trying to continue their failing business model that assumes people will pay for whatever crap they choose to market? Make good movies and people will pay you to make more good movies, make crap and try to market it as gold and people will through shit ba

This is an attempt to put a precedent into law. The next step will be massive numbers of lawsuits against everything under the sun, clogging up the legal system to the point where they can say "Look, put in a DCMA-style takedown system and we won't have to bother you anymore". Some judge tired of hearing these cases will start the ball rolling. At that point we may as well just hand UK internet over to the MPA.

It's more akin to suing Voxhaul for selling a Vectra that could be potentially used to take a sports shooter who will never shoot anyone to a gun shop.

This is obviously a false scenario mind you, as no one in their right mind would be caught dead driving a Vectra.

No one in their right mind would be caught dead spelling "Vauxhall" as "Voxhaul" either. Come on. I'm from Canada, and they don't even sell those cars in North America, and I knew it was spelled incorrectly....

Because all those using usenet to get movies would otherwise have purchased them? I doubt it.

I think if you can be bothered to download a movie from usenet (which is not as straightforward as just pressing "play" on your TV recorder), you are probably quite interested in that movie, and there is indeed quite a good chance you would have paid something to see it.
So, no, not everyone would otherwise have purchased it, but an unknown percentage would.

It may be more effort the first time (and maybe that is more effort than getting Netflix maybe not - depends on having a credit card, etc). Internationally it may be the easiest/only way to access this content After that it's just a browsing exercise.

It's not much more complex. The point of newzbin seems to be to provide indexes of usenet groups, providing files that instruct clients which posts they need to download to get a particular movie and how to assemble them. Presumably you just go to their web site, pick the thing you want to download, click on a link to the file describing it, and then your usenet client grabs the files, assembles them and presents them for you to play.

The more interesting thing to note is that the number of users willing

Under Article 10, “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by a public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent states from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema.”

The Convention continues; “The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibiliti

They are most definitely not suffering massive losses. Massive copyright infringement does not necessarily mean massive losses, the two have never been connected in any meaningful way. It's merely speculation, fuzzy math, and fear-mongering from big business.

"The applicants and others have been making huge efforts, not only against the Newzbin website, but against piracy in general and yet the industries are still suffering huge losses to piracy," Richard Spearman, representing the MPA, told the court.

I guess this is as close we'll ever get to hearing them say "Over the past 10 years we've spent a lot of our members' cash trying to kill off sharing sites, yet we've ultimately proven ineffective."

Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and others have affected piracy far more than the RIAA/MPAA/etc. ever will.

The MAFIAA should take a look at usenet service providers. They charge a flat monthly fee for all-you-can-download or you can buy so many gigabytes of data allowance. If they offered something like that with music in FLAC format and a good selection of TV and movies I'd probably take them up.

I suppose we'll eventually see a package deal with movies, TV, and music all for one monthly price. I doubt we'll ever see lossless included in that, but we can dream;).

It's not a subscription service, but FLAC has been gaining more and more speed online.

Topspin [topspinmedia.com] handles a lot of big names (I see Beastie Boys, The Doors, Linkin Park, Lady Gaga, and Paul McCartney on their front page. Lots more deeper in.) as well as a ton of awesome indie bands (The Whigs [thewhigs.com] are great, check them out!).

The MAFIAA should take a look at usenet service providers. They charge a flat monthly fee for all-you-can-download or you can buy so many gigabytes of data allowance. If they offered something like that with music in FLAC format and a good selection of TV and movies I'd probably take them up.

Or, to put it another way, these usenet service providers are making money out of copyright infringement, which I thought we didn't agree with here, as it will be perfectly obvious from which groups are being accessed whether people are downloading Linux ISOs or the latest Transformers pile of crap.

Or, to put it another way, these usenet service providers are making money out of copyright infringement, which I thought we didn't agree with here, as it will be perfectly obvious from which groups are being accessed whether people are downloading Linux ISOs or the latest Transformers pile of crap.

What I meant was that there is a market for such a service, and as rights holders the MAFIAA are in a position to provide one legally. In fact that is pretty much what Spotify, Hulu and Netflix do, right? Flat monthly fee, consume as much as you like.

I don't agree with people making money from copyright infringement, but that doesn't alter the fact that they are doing. And the fact that they are doing means that people are willing to pay to commit copyright infringement. That means that they are willing to pay for the media, but they don't agree with the terms that the owners are providing. They should take a look at this and see why they're rather pay to get their products illegally than legally.

A service like that was being offered in China by Nokia not so long ago if i recall...Because they have to compete against widespread piracy in china, the end users actually get better deals... In other countries, they try to suppress piracy through legal means so they can gouge everyone else on price.

That's what happens when you make censorship legal, like the UK recently did. People are going to start expecting you to enforce it

Preventing people from downloading free versions of copyrighted material is not censorship. If I want to see Fast and Furious 5 (or whatever) I can go to the cinema, get it on DVD, watch it on Sky or whatever. I do not have a human right to be able to downloaded it for no cost at my convenience.
Calling this censorship is trivialising real censorship, such as executing journalists or placing artists under house arrest.

Preventing people from downloading free versions of copyrighted material is not censorship. If I want to see Fast and Furious 5 (or whatever) I can go to the cinema, get it on DVD, watch it on Sky or whatever. I do not have a human right to be able to downloaded it for no cost at my convenience.

Not everything on Usenet (not even all the binary stuff) is illegal copies of copyrighted materials. There's plenty of legal stuff too. So yes, trying to make an ISP block an entire site is censorship. Especially since none of that material is actually available from Newzbin2. You can get NZB files from it, which you'll need to use with an actual Usenet provider to download anything illegal. Newzbin2 is basically an index, nothing more, it's not even quite equivalent to a torrent tracker because you ca

I have, and that makes me a little worried when i see the xxAA use claims of "massive losses" to justify their continuous lawsuit, i mean; When i no longer go to, or rent movies, the xxAA suffers losses, that is after all the point of boycotting them:) BUT, if all the xxAA has to do, is to make the claim; if i am not buying their "content" then i must be stealing it! where does that leave me and my little boycott? is there any point to a boycott, if it can be dismissed so easily? should i just forget it, and start pirating?

is there any point to a boycott, if it can be dismissed so easily? should i just forget it, and start pirating?

Boycotts do not work. Not against an adversary of the MAFIAA's financial might. Assassinating their officials, murdering their lawyers, bombing their offices and targeting their assets with wholesale destruction, however, will work. The sweet money your masters pay you ain't so sweet anymore if the price for it is being pumped full of red-hot lead at your workplace or being beheaded in front of your employees.

Hell - what about the sheer reality of economics today? With less cash floating around people typically don't have as much leisure cash. Instead of seeing movies at the box office maybe they'll wait and rent? Or instead of movies, how about beer?

At the end of the day, file sharing wont go away. It may well change forms and maybe even go back to sneaker net or "swap meets" but no matter what they do, they won't be able to get back to the 80s revenue streams. (It doesn't help that the music is more crap these days, but thats another argument)

At the end of the day, the world of file sharing has been changed forever by the internet. We can get offshore encrypted proxies for as little as $5.

The other major difference the net has made is that people are better connected and tend to gravitate to like minded people. In the world of instant communication, encryption and dropbox et all, sharing will just mutate into other forms, and groups with similar interests will create their own file sharing platforms and darknets.

Also in my area at least (or my interests) there are more artists giving stuff for free.

The days of mega money from media are gone. All this is akin to trying to put toothpaste back in the tube, it's not going to work.

Yep. The difference today is that you can see the sharing going on -- and that, of course, is why the media companies then mobilized their wall of lawyers.
For an industry that's "going out of business" due to sharing, they sure as hell are taking a long time to die.

For people on a good wage with little or no dependants it is a relatively small amount of money and I remember those days well. That's not what the population of the world consists of though.

I have kids now. We can and have fed our family of 4 for a week on ten quid when the need has arose and sometimes when it hasn't just because. I consider ourselves comfortable and know other people and families in comparatively impoverished circumstances to our selves. I've never met anyone who is malnourished or star

When you grow up you will realise that the relatively small amount of money that adults spend on music/movies/games or whatever is really not an issue to them, and they'd rather spend ten quid on a DVD than hours downloading and reassembling it from usenet.

You obviously live in Yuppieland and have no idea of the plight of lower middle class families in America. Dual 100K incomes is not the norm. Hell, dual $30k incomes isn't even the norm.

I personally know a number of families who are having trouble putting food on the table on a weekly basis, and no they aren't lazy fucks. One family has five jobs between the two adults. I'd like to see you try to support a family on $10 or less an hour. That's a premium wage for "non-professional" workers in my city

OK, it is time for reckoning. Does anyone believe anymore that money loss is the prime drive of the media distributors? I don't. It is impossible that all of them are fools and do not see that they can only loose.

So, what is the deal? What do they want?

I don't know but my speculation is that it is about control of the internet. They just got a good deal with governments. Our Overlords use false, unprovable claim of money loss, the distributors play along. G'ment installs total control banging the drum (rein

They are trying to get BT to use this s00per s33cret anti child pornography blacklist to do their dirty work. The blacklist that wasn't supposed to ever be used for commercial interests and was supposed to be 'to protect the children.' Now the MPA is saying to use it.. to protect their commercial interests.

Newzbin doesn't host the files either. They're an indexer, and even these days I'd still say that there is a lot more perfectly legal content on usenet than not. There are still thousands of very active

Am I the only one who would be willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for an HD downloaded non-DRMed copy?

Netflix is close with their service but you have to keep re-streaming the thing every time. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable fee for a service where I could get something similar to what one could get from the newsgroups. That being a fast and high quality download without DRM that I can stick on my local server and watch anywhere in the house.

I had a similar thought when I saw this story yesterday. BT and the other ISPs in the UK should just kick the MPAA off the internet - cut any service they have in the UK and block all their sites hosted abroad. There's no reason why ISPs should be forced to do business with them.